


inclinations

by sunshowerst



Series: danny and rusty and no one else on earth [3]
Category: Ocean's Eleven Trilogy (Movies)
Genre: (tess and danny mentions because of course), Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Feelings Realization, Getting Together, Lovers to Guilt-free Lovers, M/M, danny gets there eventually
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-18 15:20:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29120358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunshowerst/pseuds/sunshowerst
Summary: It takes a while, a time served and two divorces for Danny to catch on.
Relationships: Danny Ocean/Rusty Ryan, Danny Ocean/Tess Ocean
Series: danny and rusty and no one else on earth [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2128335
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23





	inclinations

The sun is setting over the sand and smoke and mirrors and Rusty is in Vegas, cause Danny had his ways of being very convincing when he’s had enough time to think, and enough time bored to be prompted to do as such. Like in a cellblock he ended up in when he failed to be convincing, between gray walls and gray meals and gray dotted lines he were to sign.

Knew to be persuasive, when he cares about the subject matter enough. Rusty tries not to think of himself in the role of the subject matter, even if his heart jumps and startles like he’s twenty years younger than he was two months ago when Danny told him over a glass of murky amber and cold, that he came looking for him first.

-

They just about make it to Rusty’s apartment two months ago. By the time he kicks his shoes off Danny has already singed his throat enough times to actually burn, like whiskey but on the opposite side, already bruised his arms and messed up his hair and kissed him like Robinson would the soil governed by anyone but a god you can’t talk to.

Rusty lets him have his way because Danny was denied things like fresh air and room for his mind to stretch out and soak up the ifs and maybes for four years, and he’d seen Danny hesitate to open the door to his room like he wasn’t allowed in without proper clearance, so.

Rusty lets him. Danny doesn’t talk about it in the morning, and Rusty doesn’t expect him to ever bring up any of it, after that. 

Expects to be the subject matter, though. As if Danny would ever return a favor he didn’t even realize he owned.

-

She’s an art appraiser. _Curator. Whatever._ Rusty feels his slight bit of foolish hope drain bit by bit with Linus' words.

Knows what face he’ll be met with if he turns around on the risk of getting recognized. If only to confirm that Danny really did do this, to him, and felt no need to spare a warning for him to heed. Rusty never had a problem, before that evening, with being the means. But Danny never weaved him into a plan, before that evening, where the end was someone else.

Linus continues, oblivious and nervous enough to try and fill in the stretch of silence Rusty left for him to deal with. “She has an eye for the details, they say. Could be useful.”

Rusty absently nods at something else entirely as he loses interest in the shrimp cocktail.

-

The orange light was an unfair touch, having an argument in the shadows of themselves and obscured facial expressions that would have told Rusty everything - as if he didn’t already piece together what was left of the parts that let him know, loud and clear before Danny dared to, that he was just as good as anyone else. Just matter, no subject to it.  


“Tess doesn’t split eleven ways,” he says, rationally. _And I don’t share anything I can’t stand to lose,_ he thinks, with not that small amount of sorrow, and Danny misses out on the unsaid, for the first time since they were teens. That’s answer enough, Rusty reconciles, and suppresses the bile that rose in his throat like he didn’t just find out that Danny lost him without any prior notice or intention to come pick him back up, when this is over.

"I lost a something. I want to get it back."

Rusty smiles, light and airy, because his job was to lie good enough to fool himself. Moves his seventy tonne tongue as if it were even lighter.

"Yeah," he says, his bite of apple suddenly tasting vaguely of cheap rubber. "You did."

-

When the job is over he drives Tess home.

When the sentence is over he drives them both to a hotel nearby and hotwires a car for himself to leave in, for Kentucky. From there, Europe. Definitely Europe.

-

He comes back when Reuben calls him in for a new job.

Leaves behind the rock roads of Rome as old as the first lie, and Isabel’s mouth, her hands, her mouth but when shaping wordless sentences, and his own skin, tight across ribs and hipbones like he was trying to escape himself and ended up running into a mirror and hitting his head for good measure.

Reuben conveniently fails to mention that Danny's on the job too. He finds a bucket of ice with Merlot and Crystal and two limes in the room Reuben paid for as a sorry, so that was a bit on the nose. 

"Hey, Rus."

His blood boils. He stays expressionless, cause he’s not done playing Seneka yet when it comes to his own matters. Cause he’s in a hotel lobby and the lights make him feel his age every time he remembers his own ones, flourishing now but not from his hand. Cause Danny is still wearing the ring and pulling this shit and not getting with the picture he’s so desperately framing. Again and again. 

And again. He wishes Danny would skip to the hanging it backwards part, catches himself doing so.

And suddenly Rusty’s not mad anymore. Just tired. From within, from the bone marrow and his soul that brewed inside it. 

He sinks in the leather chair across from Danny and closes his eyes, because jet lag. Because Danny’s looking at him and Rusty doesn’t give him the same courtesy back. Because the two bottles in his room minus the blueprints they’re supposed to both be in possession of means one of them isn’t here for the job, and the other is conditioned to wait. It’s not gonna last, ergo ipso facto it’s not worth it. 

"Tess and I are taking a break."

He nearly snorts out a laugh that would fall short of a shot at not sounding bitter. 

"I'm sorry.” He says instead. Stops himself before he can add that he’d seen it from miles away, but Danny likely hears it anyway. It’s on him if he doesn’t, Rusty thinks, and then remembers that he doesn’t have a damn to spare. Or waste.

"I’m saying that because I’m not going to lie to you again."

That gets him to open his eyes. That gets Danny to give another speech, though, and misses a slam dunk. He feels a headache claw at his skull, and regrets for mostly that reason, showing up at all.

Danny reads him accurately, but again, misses the point that was practically given away. Big picture of dots that were more like pointillism, so dense that he should’ve seen it even as a big picture guy. He doesn’t though, and Rusty wishes he was born a cruel man, but he wasn’t. 

"You came back. I can count on you. I don’t want that to go bust, at least."

Rusty doesn’t have the heart to tell him he's ruining it currently. Just shrugs, and lets Danny take it as whatever he’d hoped it to mean. 

Sinks the Merlot in one night and lets his lungs expand past his ribs. Decides to let Danny think they both have time for this, if only to see it through again.

-

"We're casing it tomorrow," Danny says that, about the hotel Rusty didn’t even bother remembering the name of, that night at dinner, and his low planning voice still gets Rusty like the first time. That was one thing that won’t go bust, no matter the ring and the girl and the way Danny stared at him without realizing what the implications are, of staring at him like that.

When Rusty takes a swig of his whiskey and motions at the college aged bartender for another one, his eyes stay locked on Rusty’s fingers, then Rusty’s mouth, then Rusty, and if it were anyone but Danny and his ocean of emotional constipation, he'd be setting his bills on the table and walking out of the joint certain he'd get to have some of the best sex in his life that night.

But this was Danny. And he was Rusty. He has nothing better to do than wait these days, anyways.

-

“You dragged ten of us into this, back when. For her. So why are you here?” _And not with her? Danny, why do you think you’re here?_

Before Danny says it, looking stranded in the middle of Rusty’s hotel room, he knows what this is and wishes, not for the first time, that he’d never come back from Europe.

"Don’t know yet." 

Rusty wants to sigh more than he ever wanted anything in his life. 

"I’m sleeping in the other room," he says instead. Leaves before Danny can gather the wits to grab his wrist and ask him to stay, cause it would have taken one look at his face for Rusty to crumble and do as he’d been told.

-

A week into it, Danny pushes him down to the bed and straddles his hips and he had to think, despite being drunk, or because of it. The whisper of silk falling to the floor is too distracting, the weight of Danny pressing into him too loud and bright and familiar to let his brain work.

"Why--?" 

"Why not," Danny asks, his lips hot and trailing wet on Rusty’s throat like it’s a delicacy, and it was cutting his air supply short. 

"--married," he breathes out like he's the one that took the vows, when Danny’s hand runs down past the flaps of his robe, dips inside to set fire to his bare skin and skirt past his ribs, down his abs, over his hip bones. All while sucking marks into his skin and implying things Rusty shouldn’t begin to think about with this little oxygen getting to his brain.

"What, you’ve grown morals since I’ve last seen you?" Danny jokes, and Rusty huffs a laugh but thinks, clear and stern, no, that was you. Pretending, but still that's what _you_ did and keep fucking doing. 

"Boundaries."

"Ah." Danny, to his credit, looks like he's genuinely contemplating that, for barely ten seconds. "Does this cross those?" 

His mouth is hovering near Rusty’s ear, breath fanning the soft skin behind it that Danny sears with a kiss. 

"A-ah. Yeah."

"Mmhm. How about this?" 

Grinding down on his crotch makes them both groan, and Rusty sees stars at noon fifty when Danny shoves his legs apart by wedging his knee between them and up, up, higher. 

"Yes."

"Thought so," Danny mutters in a husky voice, grabbing his face with his free hand and pressing his lips to Rusty’s, biting his bottom one and sucking on his tongue hungrily. Demandingly. 

Rusty isn’t an idiot. He knows this won’t last- wills himself to know it, because he feels the ring against his skin when Danny strokes him. He relaxes in spite of it, forces a calm, cause this was Danny, and he could trust Danny with so much more than his life, so much deeper than intimacy. 

No one else he slept with was by default a safe person, so now that he didn't have to worry about his throat getting slit he exposed it, tipped his head back for Danny to have free reign on his neck and devour him. And that he did, thoroughly, paid attention to the details.

He closes his eyes and loses sight of any thought, any process and focuses on Danny’s warm mouth and the tight hot that reduced him to a single instance in time that started and stopped incrementally; with every breath he managed to take during which Daniel Ocean had him in his mouth, melting his soul to a paste- holy salt and a moan that tore his throat like it was yanked out of him with silk. 

He’s pretty sure his eyes sparkle by the time Danny licks him clean and kisses the middle of his chest, nestling there for a nap and letting him catch his breath and realize how fucked he was for allowing himself this, again.

-

In the morning, Danny is not there but his wedding band is, on the nightstand, because Rusty wasn’t the one that grew morals or bored.

-

In the evening, Reuben phones him. He called off the job that Rusty was now convinced didn’t exist in the first place. He says that Danny wasn’t in his head, or in form enough to pull it off. Rusty didn’t really pay attention to the conversation. He did throw his phone away, after texting the new number to everyone but Reuben and Danny and Linus, to buy himself time.

-

(He crosses half the US before Basher, or Turk, finally cracks and gives him away.)

Rusty is disinterestedly dipping his fries in the chocolate milkshake he bought from across the street. He turns down advances and rubs his forehead, pushing back at the dull thrumming of an upcoming headache that kept him company valiantly and loyally for the past four weeks on the road, without fail. Whiskey here was ass (bourbon) and did nothing to settle his nerves and calm his stomach,, and the barkeep stared at him a bit longer than professional or necessary when he popped a cherry in his mouth and let his tongue swirl around it before he spit the pit out. 

“Large fries to go?" a low, rich voice says from behind him and slaps a ten on the table. Rusty goes to his car and acts like he didn’t just shiver from hearing Danny talk for the first time in a month.

-

"What now?" he asks, an hour into the drive. The sun is setting far ahead of them and the road is the kind of hot that makes the air quiver, makes his fingers itch for a glass of something amber and iced and his teeth for something to sink into.

Danny rests his hand, heavy with intent, on Rusty's thigh in lieu of an answer. Deft fingers splayed out and ringless and brushing the inner side just so- Rusty has the mind to pull over before he gets jumped by Danny and kissed over the stick shift, no guilt to it for the first time since before her. Breathless, new. All, nothing. “Now I know my place," Danny says into his mouth without needing to and Rusty feels his own lips stretch in a smile for an answer. He’s everywhere and too close and warm and demanding, prying his lips open to lick into Rusty’s mouth and taste all of it. Map it like for a blueprint, like a mark, a mouth he’d feed and steal from and come back to, devoted. The crackle of the radio playing fifties music and the wet and pleased sounds of them kissing was the only event on earth at around four in the afternoon on highway fifty.

Danny drives for the two hours left to reach Rusty’s reservation, patting blindly for Rusty’s hand till he finds it, and brings it up to his lips to kiss the inner wrist; slow, gentle, eyes never leaving the road. Holds it after, thumb sliding over his knuckles like a rosary, and only lets go when he shifts gears. 

Rusty lets his eyes fall closed.

**Author's Note:**

> hope you liked this one! feedback always welcome and appreciated!
> 
> thank you for all the support <3 (especially you, username cleardishwashers, i love and owe you :')))
> 
> edit: renamed to 'inclinations'


End file.
